“My friends, hope has prevailed,” said Fergus, addressing supporters at Bar Le Sportif on rue Principale in Aylmer. “And so has the conviction that as citizens, as member of a community, we can work together to build a better future for all. Our difference is not weakness. Our diversity is strength.”

Fergus congratulated Turmel for representing the constituency for the last four years.

Fergus took the lead early in the evening, and hung on, ending up with a healthy margin of victory. With 185 of 220 polls reporting, Fergus had 12,837 ballots compared to Turmel’s 7,672.

“We need to accept the decision, the population has decided,” Turmel told about 50 supporters gathered at Les Brasseurs microbrewery on Montcalm Street.

“There are no regrets for me. I have regrets for our team of volunteers, who work really hard. I’m really proud of the effort of the team and I thank the people who supported me.”

She told her supporters to continue to work together toward the goal of building the community they want.

Turmel said she will take a few days off to consider her future.

The Hull-Aylmer campaign was based on debate on local issues — with a few last-minute shenanigans.

The issues were all linked to a central theme: The federal government and the public service, both in terms of the actual employment they provide the region, and ithe contribution to the booming growth in both Old Hull and the town of Aylmer.

Turmel took the riding from the Liberals in 2011’s Orange Wave with a whopping 59.2 per cent of the vote. She and Fergus both pledged to safeguard public service jobs. Turmel’s promises appeared to be accepted at face value, in large part because she was president of the Public Service Alliance of Canada. Fergus, a past president of the Liberal Party who’s been active in the community, was successful in distancing himself from the fact that the public service downsizing began under former Liberal prime minister Paul Martin.

The candidates were similarly on the same wavelength, with slight differences, in areas such as infrastructure development.

All of the major candidates made promises to improve mass transit in the widespread, booming riding. Continued growth in the riverside community has led to lots of upscale renovation with pretty bistros and shops along the old Aylmer Road leading to a bustling marina, creating a sort of West Quebec Westboro.

But the area is poorly served by both regular bus service and the Rapibus (Gatineau’s Transitway system). Turmel and Fergus, along with Bloc Québécois candidate Maude Chouinard-Boucher and Green standard-bearer Roger Fleury, all pledged to fight for more money for transit improvements.

Several times during the campaign they lamented the hundreds of millions of federal dollars pledged for light rail in Ottawa, with “not a penny for Gatineau.”

Similarly, there were assurances from all candidates on assistance for small business, social housing, environment. Different responses to the problems, assuredly, but serious proposals from most quarters.

While the campaign mainly stayed on the high road there were two incidents which raised eyebrows and drew complaints to Elections Canada.

The first came late in September when ill-fated Conservative candidate Etienne Boulrice released confidential info on a funding request the city had made to the federal government to put on the Mosaïcultures exhibit during Canada’s 150th birthday celebrations in 2017.

The information — a request for about $14.5 million from the feds — isn’t that shocking in and of itself. But Fergus and others were upset that Boulrice admitted he came across the figure while working in the office of Heritage Minister Shelley Glover.

The other involved a complaint by the NDP to Elections Canada in the last week of the campaign that the Liberals were gossiping that Turmel, who turned 73 in September, was “extremely sick,” possibly near death. The complaint cited four incidents involving mostly Liberal campaign workers, but also alleged that Pontiac Liberal candidate Will Amos made such a remark last month.

Fergus — who is not named as having personally spread the rumours — and Amos furiously denied the allegations.

Made up of the former cities of Aylmer and Hull, the riding had had Liberal representatives (apart from the three-year conversion of former MP Gilles Rocheleau to the Bloc Québécois in 1990) for more than a century until Turmel crushed incumbent Marcel Proulx. The riding has about 91,000 eligible voters, with French the primary language in about 80 per cent of the homes. The National Household Survey indicates the French-English split is closer at work, with French listed as primary in a ratio of about 3-2.

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